Henri sprawled himself awkwardly across the front seat of the Meiboch™. Mira and Margot curled up in back. We moved the car right up to the front door and covered it with a ragged blue tarp we’d found to keep out the sun—and any bears, we told Mira.
Norflo swept out some space in a bedroom near an old bed too collapsed and gross to sleep on. Sera and I slept downstairs curled up on top of Placer bags and spare clothes. It was not a comfortable night. Whatever else you could say about modern times, the Swailert™ foam mattress I’d grown up sleeping on was very comfortable.
During the night, Sera rolled close and curled up against me. I let her be. It was cold, and her body was warm. It was a comforting reminder of how Saretha and I had often slept—at least before everything went wrong.
I wasn’t awake when morning dawned. Somehow I managed to sleep until a bright, filtered light filled the room. I’d never seen such intensity, and my eyes could barely accept it.
Henri, Norflo and Margot were already up, sitting in the other room, carefully picking through a box Norflo had found in a room under the ground. The box itself was stained and barely holding together. It was filled with thin, water-damaged books full of pictures. They were warped, flaking and faded. A black smudgy mold made many of them hard to read.
A lot of the books had the same title with different dates and pictures. The one Margot said to pay attention to was a book called TIME, which mostly had people’s faces looking out. One had a black cover—not from mold, but because it was printed that way. It was rimmed in a faded red ink. The word TIME was written on the top and beneath it, in the same red against the black, were the words Is Truth Dead?
“What are these books about?” I asked.
“Lots,” Norflo said. His eyes were glued to the page he was reading.
“It’s hard to follow,” Henri said, flashing me a smile before returning to his own reading. Sadness welled up in me. My argument with Sera had left me feeling emotional and full of regret. But Henri still believed in me, even after what I’d done. I think he’d accepted my apology long before I made it—maybe even before we spoke in the Squelch back in Keene.
“I do not think they are books,” Margot said. “They all have the word magazine on them. I think it is a different thing.” She turned and picked up one she had saved. “Look at this.” She opened to a specific page. Large black letters read: Bikram Choudhury Can’t Copyright His Yoga Poses.
“That was in 2015?” I asked, glancing at the cover.
“Yes. I do not think words were Copyrighted then, either,” Margot said, looking at the picture of Bikram sitting cross-legged and shirtless.
“No, they were,” Henri said, pointing to a notice on an inside page that said All Rights Reserved. “But look at this.”
He held up a map similar to the one I had tried to memorize back at the real estate agency, but the borders were completely different.
“There’s no Vermaine,” I remarked absently. In the same general area were three states: Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It was like they merged Vermont and Maine and got rid of New Hampshire entirely.
“Check this,” Norflo said, handing a magazine over to me. It was called Cos-something-tan. I couldn’t fully read it because there was a thin, busty woman on the cover whose gorgeous wavy hair covered most of the title. Her skin was the same shade as mine—the same shade as most of us in the Onzième—but flawless and with a sheen that was obviously fake, like the computer-generated version of Saretha. Just under the blocked title was a red banner with the words for Latinas, like it was part of some marketing campaign.
My heart began pounding a little.
“See?” Norflo said as I began flipping through the pages. The magazine was full of Ads. The only real difference I saw was models with dark hair, dark eyes and skin like mine.
One Ad really struck me. A family held hands at the rim of a hill, smiling for the camera. It looked a little like our family, with two parents and three kids. It was trying to make me feel something about retirement savings, but that wasn’t the effect. It made me think about how we were going to free my parents and then escape all of this. Soon, I hoped, we would all be together somewhere.
An odd warmth flooded my chest looking up from my magazine to the others. Wasn’t this a family, too? Norflo seemed pleased with my reaction. Behind him, Henri flashed me another smile. When I had pretended I wanted Henri to kiss me, I didn’t have time to consider how I actually felt about him. But now I knew: I loved him like a brother. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him and Margot to be happy together, even if their relationship was a little strange. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to explain it out loud, but I longed for the day I could try.
No wonder words cost so much. They were so precious.
Sera put her chin on my shoulder and looked at the Ad with me. I felt the urge to remind her she’d insisted she wasn’t Latino, but there was a power in knowing when to be silent and when to speak.
“They marketed to us,” Norflo said. “Thought we were important enough that they made one of these magazines just for us. Whoever lived in this house was probably Latino.” Norflo gestured around in wonder. “That has to matter. What came before has to matter. They tried to hide our history, Jiménez, but it isn’t gone. We can’t let it be gone.”
I felt myself stirring at his words. I was suddenly so grateful he could speak to me, unrestricted, without having to limit himself to what he could eke out on a Word$ Market™ screen.
“How do we get it back?” I asked.
Norflo held up a few of the magazines. “These have history. They just wrote it as history happened.”
“They assume the reader knows what came before—which we do not,” Margot sighed. “And the poor fools had no idea what was coming.”
“Which we do,” Henri said, elbowing her.
“Yes, Henri.”
“There’s nothing after 2026,” Henri said, showing me a cover with an image made up of hundreds of other covers. The words Our Final Print Issue were emblazoned across the top in bold letters.
Being together like this, looking over forbidden material, was comforting to me, yet just feeling that comfort made me uneasy. It couldn’t last. We had a long way to go, and I wanted to get there. The warm feeling in my chest had cooled, and I could feel myself buzzing with an urge to move.
“Could we pack these in the car and go?” I asked. “You could read them while I drive.”
I also wasn’t sure we should be breathing the air this house provided, and the sunlight unnerved me, even if it wasn’t direct. The car seemed safer. Silas Rog would have been sure it was secure against daylight, or anything else that might harm him. If I knew anything about the Rogs, it was that they always took care of themselves.
Margot frowned at me. “We could,” she said, sniffing a mold-covered magazine before tossing it aside. She neatened up her save pile and put the good ones in the box.
I rolled up our things and packed our bags back up. There was a cheeping sound outside: birds. I’d heard birds in Portland before the dropters got them, but never in a group. They never lived long enough to gather, but there were dozens of them outside this house. The noise of them grew louder.
Margot froze in the doorway, box in hand. She backed up.
“Run,” she said to Mira, and then to all of us. “Run!”
She dropped the box and took off, grabbing Mira’s hand. Henri straightened up, perplexed. His fingers slipped from his box as he stood. Margot shooed Mira out an open window in the back and jumped out after her, calling, “Henri!”
My brain tried to catch up. What was out there? Why was Margot running?
“Speth Jime, you are hereby commanded to surrender,” a man’s voice called out, amplified by a bullhorn.
My blood ran cold at the sound of that voice. Norflo pulled at my arm, but I felt frozen in place. Sera watched us, looking furious.
“Speth,” Henri said. He and Norflo started to drag me toward the back window.
“They just want me,” I said, struggling against them. “You need to go! They won’t kill me.”
“You don’t know that!” Norflo exclaimed.
“They’re coming,” Henri said. I couldn’t see what was happening.
“They don’t care about you,” I said, pushing Norflo away.
“Go,” Henri said to him. “Help Mira and Margot. They can’t kill me, either. I’m Indentured. I’m worth too much.”
Norflo took off. Sera followed, then paused in the window.
I shooed her off and raced to the door. There were police cars and men advancing. Lawyers. And they were wearing masks, which meant there would be sleep gas, too.
“Don’t kill the girl,” a voice instructed. Lucretia Rog. It came from a dropter. How did they get a dropter out here without the WiFi? My heartbeat pounded in my ears as the police officers held out their Cuffs. There was a loud popping sound.
“Oh,” Henri gasped from beside me. He fell to the ground, red spreading around him. My eyes went misty as I reached out for him. There was a gurgling breath, and I couldn’t tell if it was mine or his. Suits and armor and dropters all blurred and dimmed. Far off in the distance, I heard Sera screaming.
Someone yanked on my arm, but I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to dream this wasn’t real.
Then there was nothing.